It was “ethical trade” that broke me—that pinpricked my balloon of everything as surely as it had the silence, the expectancy of our little group. Goodpostured smart-cazsh yuppie shits, me included, nestled into the wall in this conventionally idiosyncratic café that screams its business plan at you with its Pantone™ 13-0116 Pastel Green walls & cork-propped white marble tables that gives wagyu blush. Some fern spikes into my neck but I've adjusted its pot already, kickshoved it insufficiently far so now it's here for good & so very obviously an irritant that none of us acknowledge my failure. Them, polite; myself, falsely blasé.
Anyhow. Maybe it's some ritual no-one ever tells you, I hadn't cottoned on last time, but this was the second time our group had been somewhere and ordered our coffees and—you could have timed it—a heavenly precise thirty point oh seconds after Laura gets hers, out comes the "how's everyone's coffee?" schtick. Exquisite Copernican motion... Starbucks cultural critique gliding over the rings of Saturn for a thousand years to arrive perfectly, predictably, horribly on cue. So then you get the clockwise sounding off of our perfunctory analyses of the brew, smooth, exotic, rich—I can't fucking stand you people—and fern-spiked me is last and the caffeine slut joke isn't taken yet so I babybird it out for laughs. But that's not what breaks me. Not yet.
There's a silence, not in fact but of the mind, because Charlie yawns real loud and stretches and Arith—obviously 'our' brown one, by the way, literally never mentioned in all five years so you know they're shit scared of saying it but I mean come on, *Arith*! three whities and their token, what's it they say, every token's spent, I love Arith but let's all just verbalise the race thing this once and ask where he's from, no? Bandaid off, desacralize the bloody subject, no?—well Arith checks his phone, fuck knows what Laura does, physically speaking, my eyes are in the wall and my focus on this Fern Invader of My Neck, this photosynthetic rapist lil frond, but none of us are present socially. We don't know what to say.
Finally Laura resumes, a thoroughly unnecessary follow-up, might I add, says something about how she loves that this Pantone™ juggernaut of Sunday mornings does ethical trade too, and from too I don't hear shit because everything is stripped of everything. Laura shoots the fuck away from me; hyperspaces out of there to the other side of the suddenly three-mile-long Death Row of liminal space. Fern Invader draws blood and god is that thing serrated and behind the paint is a rusted turquoise jail cell of nihilism that I've been trapped in all along. My coffee's black. Warden-made. Saturn goes out with a soft confetti bang above me and embers of coherence sting my eyes.
It's in that moment that I realise, I really really really realise, that I just don't LIKE you people. I don't like your cashmere or your listicles or Charlie's new big job in Schmoperations, Charlie, it's killing you! I'm sick to death of this coffee-tea-leaf reading horoscopic bullshit, how none of you ever say weak, you won't say normal, it's a normal goddamn coffee and you know it, look at the clientele! Look at us!
Laura, I want to deposition her, Laura, you're always reading and girl that's great but say something about it! All you ever have for us is a name, a nationality, backcover blurb & minority shit, "I love her work" yes but tell us what you T.H.I.N.K! I see it all at once, the whole literary desert of her soul, ten thousand vultures circling the carcass of some bastard postmodern Romanticism and plucking out its eyes for prose. Half-chunks, tendon, they're getting desperate now, all books about how sadness is ok and society doesn't let us feel and Laura nods along because she feels and slowly this is substituted with more of a desire to feel than a true feeling itself and Laura, Laura, think something, and—! ! !
Baritone automatic gunfire seizes the world. The windows waterfall down in unison, the long cafe cubes itself back up. My neck is really gushing oh, fuck it's on my hands and I'm struck that the blood has the same brown translucency as on a chopping board just-done with steak. Three men have entered. Conventionally idiosyncratic—AKs, sure, but street garb, bracelets. Young. Brown, obviously, and I feel awfully guilty about this and look to Arith who is prostrating himself to some WaPo article about Ecuadorian Arabica, Laura Charlie nodding sagely you're no more Latin than us, Arith I think and he meets my gaze and smiles. Well, Arith is shot immediately, his head explodes and I feel a little better because that's brown-on-brown & therefore not a racist visual, right?- anyhow I'm up out of my seat and charging, leaping, a bullet of my own fired through this pale green cafe-barrel and down onto Gunman #1.
Dream sequences have a non-linearity to them, don't they, esp. the lucid ones, so I know already that to be properly, cinematically injured for my culminating takedown of #3 then #2 must shoot me and #1 must stab me, so, how shall this arise? #1's AK is pinned to the floor by my left hand and so it's his left that unsheathes something—I never do see where from—this small near-perfect-diamond obsidian dagger with a delicate gold pommel, more sacrificial than practical, snarling up at me with haste that catches skin. We struggle for it and I win and I stab him a great many times through the throat. A slaughter for the greater good; I could drink his blood. It's not brown anymore, it's Hollywood hot red and everywhere soaking into us like dye. Something crunches under the blade so I lean all my weight on it and #1 is still at last but for the river deltas from his neck. All this occurring under the heated jets of gunfire into innocence, the deafening museum echo of violence imposed on order—I have to be quicker, more aggressive, kill fast and well even as everything slows and slugs along... the glass waterfalls still going and twinkling like champagne flutes, inexplicable sunset—the sun two storeys tall—streaming horizontally to silhouette everything vantablack.
What to say of Gunman #2? Rinse and repeat. Up, charge, shot, tackle, down, slicesliceslice. I never said this was one of my creative finest, chrissakes, not the point at all—this is my Chernobyl, not Chopin. Down, slice, something says I oughtta remember their faces forever in this PTSD glamour for the journos should I live—at least one of them—I long to be the sullen type—so #2 it is. I invent a face for him, this small moustachioed ratty face that somehow I forgive, blooming metal in my gut and all with another in my lung. I figure that's survivable but tragic, moreover permissive of some death rattle breaths as the ambos hoist me up- I'm ahead of myself. But, well, #3 gets it all the same. Charlie 'wow's far behind me, a tether to my former realm, and events dutifully fast forward even as I am reluctantly sucked back towards the group.
It's the oddest thing... to giftwrap your life and put a bow on it, to be there and dead and celebrated and speeches given over you & loved ones mourned, this whole long outta-body good guy thing, and yet to come back to reality where it's still Arith and fucking Ecuador! How long was I out? Could anyone tell? But no—I've nodded 'long the whole way through, ahh, right, hell- pulled that cheap trick where the moment someone uses a new noun—Arith says something about the 'Guayas' province—you mispronounce it back to them in concern to get it right. It's a cheap win for them & shows you care, shows you're filing the knowledge away for something. Something what? No-one asks. No-one cares. Even Arith doesn't care, Arabica not his thing, merely flashing his memory and readership around like a pervert, his yearly subscription-adorned cock laid out on the table for the whole café to see. At least the man appends a hot take to his diatribes— not like Laura— applies some conversational lube even as he fucks you. God, my head's all in the wrong place now, isn't it? Sensing something, Arith tries to meet my gaze again and gauge my thoughts. Not this time, friend. I busy myself with the Fern.